Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge

Who doesn't love Dodgeball?



Wow, it has been a really long time since I've posted anything. It's not that I haven't thought about it, I have. Then I have the thought, "What do I have to say?". And from there, in my head, is sounds something like this: "Don't flatter yourself, your thoughts are not so profound...Maybe I say I still miss Brandon like it was yesterday? Nah, it's been almost two years people will think I'm crazy, I should present the strong side of myself. Well then, don't tell how you broke down and got on anti-depressants last spring. No that would admit you aren't so strong Miss All Knowing Wellness Professional. Ok then, what do I say? I don't know, be inspiring, show strength, share wisdom! Nah... Fine then, don't write anything. Fine." Then the small voice from the back of my conscience says, "Excuse me, how would it feel to be authentic, be real, write from your heart. That's why you started this. Who cares what people think. This is your journey, your story. Step up sistah and put it on paper!". So here it is, sans all the voices in my head.

More than a decade ago when I was sifting my life and making the hard decision to get divorced, a woman shared the poem The Invitation,. It resonated with me so strongly that I kept a copy in my purse for years. In recent years however, I had completely forgotten about it. Then last week I was laying in bed with Sam both of us gazing at the artificial stars illuminated on the ceiling by his night light (yes, a Pillow Pet, $19.95+ S&H that he got for his birthday, but that's another story) and a phrase from the poem began to put itself together in my head. I laid there and the words, the intonation, the meaning and flow of that phrase bounced around in my head. It was like when you walk into a room and  forgot what you were going to do when you got there. The words were familiar and I could feel the comfort in the re-creation of them from a forgotten memory, but couldn't quite put them together in the right order. Thank goodness for Google, as soon as Sam was asleep I typed in the phrase and up came The Invitation in it's entirely. The piece that rolled around in my head was.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

And with that I realized that since Brandon passed away it has been comforting to surround myself with people who are able to do just that.... Sit with my loss without moving to hide it, fade it or fix it. Its seems strange, but at this point in my journey I need the moments I can bring up Brandon's name, in a social setting, without someone flinching, paralyzed by what to say or not to say and afraid of what I will do next. Yes, I might cry, or cuss or smile or just simply need a moment, but that's point - I need that moment! The moment when the love and light of my friends surpasses the darkness of losing my son. It makes me feel like I'm making progess in integrating this into who I am now. I continue to occasionally avoid and be cautious of social situations where I might be asked, "How many kids do you have." or "How old are your kids". This is where dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge come in. I have developed an arsenal of ways to avoid these questions. It makes for an interesting dance - One person innocently chatting up small talk while I dawn my gas mask and dodge, duck and dive for the floor. While another person, flack jacket ready in case I implode with memories of Brandon,  cautiously  makes small talk before they can move, hide, fade or fix the pain they feel on my behalf. Don't get me wrong, I don't go around blabbering my story. My instinctive demeanor is to be much more emotionally guarded. But it's hard when some random thing happens that makes me think of Brandon and I want to say, "I remember when Brandon.... ". But I know that because he is dead it becomes a buzz kill in any situation so I keep it to myself.  If it was about Daniel or Jason no one would flinch.

Last  year as I approached the one year anniversary I had lunch with a friend who has also lost a son. She warned me that year two was worse. Worse simply because our culture figures you're "over it" by now. Sadly, from that perspective that has been true. I could count on one hand the times anyone has asked how I am in relation to the loss of my son. Friends I haven't seen or spoken to since before he died don't touch it, they stay on the fringe of the conversation dancing like they have to go to the bathroom, hoping it doesn't come up. For some, if I bring it up, they are quick to move it, fade it, or fix it. Don't get me wrong, I get it, am guilty of the same thing and I'm not judging it. Perhaps in reading this you realize you too have a favorite tactic. Personally, I like them all. Fade is a simple tactic that allows me to glide right over an uncomfortable moment and on to something more pleasant. With my kids I like 'fix', the Mom in me wants to fix everything for them. 



In less than a month I will step across the two year threshold and continue to mark the time without Brandon. My heart can't tell time and it still aches for Brandon and misess him just as if it were yesterday. Sam talks about Brandon and heaven (like it's Detroit or some place we could go) and it twists my heart every time. Last week he colored pictures to send to Brandon...ouch! In every photo of the three boys together I only see who is not there, and won't ever be. I miss him. I miss a lot every day.

My small hope in sharing this experience is that it will allow us both to grow and move beyond the need to instantaneously move away from these painful moments. That by sitting, even if just for a moment, with someone elses pain we allow our own hearts an opportunity to soften and expand. There is no need to fix, fade, hide or move, just be present and hold the weight for a moment (I promise your won't explode). In exchange we allow the person sharing to move towards healing a broken piece of themselves. It's a win-win.



So I challenge you not to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge next time you are invited to share someone's heartache. Rather consider it a privilege that person believed in your hearts ability to expand enough to hold their story.

Into the Briar Patch

The universe has a funny sense of humor. I think I've done a fine job this past year making lemonade out of lemons, getting tough when the tough got going and any other adage suggesting we should made the best of what we have. Maybe it's my competitive spirit, but when my oven quit working on the cusp of holiday baking season I decided to make it my lemonade and see what I could do without an oven. I have made five holiday treats without as much as glance as the oven that is currently on Santa's naughty list. Scott said it was like throwing me in the briar patch.

Maybe so, maybe sometimes I choose the briar patch. Maybe I like to see what I'm made of, surprise people or surprise myself. Maybe the poke of a sharp thorn now and again reminds me to feel alive and makes me appreciate the comfortable times when there are no thorns. Maybe people who don't choose the briar patch are the ones missing something. Maybe playing it safe, always do the 'right thing', coloring inside the lines, pleasing your parents, being appropriate, holding your tongue, not taking a risk, going with the crowd, having 2.5 children, being normal isn't where we plant the seeds of a truly joyful life. What would happen if you took a risk, led from your heart, went against the grain, spoke your truth when no one wanted to hear it or just did a great big cannon ball into the briar patch? What would you learn? You would learn that the thorns were good back scratchers and that hidden within the thorns are beautiful flowers you can only see when your in the thick of it. You would learn that the people who really care about you will never leave, but rather they will cheer loudly for you to succeed and they will pull you out of the bushes when you've had enough. You would learn how thick your skin really is and how sometimes a tender touch is the best way through the tough stuff. And most of all you would feel alive because you will have proven to yourself, the only person who really matters, that there is so much to you that is waiting to be explored.

What did I learn from entering the briar patch this past week? Are you waiting for me to reveal what amazing 'a-ha' moment enlightened me, that took my personal life journey to the next level?  Wait for it....

I learned that I have a deep endearing, passionate love for Beer Pretzel Caramels! I do!  I have honestly eaten about 10-1" squares of the chewy, sweet yet salty, decadent little morsels of heaven. You say 10 isn't that many? You could do better. That was just today. I made them yesterday and they had to sit over night or that number would be much higher. 

Beer Pretzel Caramels made with Tommy Knocker Cocoa Porter

 

 

If you are still waiting for my deep thoughts on personal growth you're not going to find it in this post. Really, I do like the BPC's that much! The simple thing I learned it that I do seek out the briar patch, I always have. Sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose and I have raised boys that do the same. And how it pains me when I see them winding up for big double back flip into the thorns. I find a comfortable spot on the banks of the thicket, bring my bull horn and cheer from the edge so they know where to find me if they need anything. And now I will pack a bag of Beer Pretzel Carmels, but I'm not sharing. These are the same boys who have suffered through their parents divorce and the loss of their brother and they are deep souls that see the value in not judging people because they don't fit the mold. They own character traits that no GPA, ACT or SAT scores will ever be able to measure. They follow their hearts, and have the scars to show for it (both physical and otherwise). Their thorny adventures are often the thorns in my sides, but I wouldn't trade them for anything...except maybe Beer Pretzel Caramels.

Not everything in our lives are catastrophic opportunities to learn more about ourselves, sometimes we simply learn a new recipe that makes our hearts sing with joy. I now know that really good caramels are made with butter, sugar and heavy whipping cream (and beer in this case)... and it is sooooo good! So, just like signing up for a half-marathon keeps me logging the miles, this too will force me out the door for a few more miles in exchange for enjoying my new found melt in your mouth love. And to think, if my oven had kept working I would never had learned this and thrown myself into the briar patch (again). Here's to launching yourself into the briar patch with abandon and excitement about what you will learn, how your will grow and what you will learn to love.

The Gooey Stuff: aka The Good Stuff

The Gooey Stuff is what  holds all the pieces, big and small, of the broken heart together. It's the small dots, and big clumps of Gooey Goodness that allow me to connect the brokenness of the ugly shards and splinters.

Some days I really have to hunt for the Gooey Good stuff. Some days the good stuff is so all over that I can't avoid it. This is my current list of Gooey Goodness

An unfinished creation by Daniel out by the garden.

• The baby birds in the tree in front of my house. How amazingly awesome that Momma bird felt my tree was safe enough to raise her babies in! I love to hear them chirp when she is out there feeding them. Yesterday I took Sam out to see the babies. His eyes go so big and he instinctively got quiet watching them. What a simple joy and how lucky that I have that in my front yard. Teeney Tiny Gooey Goo, but it thrills me and puts a piece of my heart back together. 
• My son Daniel - of course he has been HUGE GOO from day one for me. Daniel and I are closer than we've ever been. Not a day goes by that we don't connect. In addition to being an amazing athlete, Daniel is an artist... a graffiti artist. Artists are such passionate perfectionists! The Gooey Goo this week was Daniel asking me to help with the color palette of his current creation. Do you know how special I felt that my 19 year old son was involving me in his passion?! Goo to the highest power!
• Running & Biking - I have tried really hard the last few weeks to be more consistent.  I continue to struggle to do this for myself. Now, I must be transparent and share that I visited my therapist a couple weeks ago.  She gently threatened that if  I wouldn't use exercise to help alleviate the stress and anxiety that I should consider a prescription. My good friends Pride and Stubbornness got all wound up and knocked me off my pity pot. Then my friends Grief  & Lazy tried to step in, but Pride and Stubbornness are bad ass girls and won the fight. Grief started to cry and Lazy wouldn't get up off the couch long enough to argue so it wasn't even a fair fight. Yes, shocking but true, every time I go run or bike I feel 100% better! Admittedly I live where my exercise excursions are on single track trails or in the mountains where peace and tranquility embed themselves into every pore without any effort on my part. When I'm done the kinetic energy of movement has put gobs of Gooey Goo into one or two more spots and is now holding another piece of broken heart together.
• Fresh Basil from my garden - I love to cook, but my life is to busy to cook in a way that fulfills this passion. Last weekend however, I made fresh Feta Basil Pesto..... A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! What a simple luxiously pleasure. The kind of Gooey Goo that is slow to seep into little cracks and crevasses of my inner foodie and roll around all warm and soft. Spread on crackers, used as sauce of a pizza, tossed in with pasta and roasted chicken. It was a gift that gave pleasure for a week. Brandon was a foodie too. He would have loved all of it! Let me know if you want the recipe, happy to share the Goo! 
• Right now writing and sitting on my back patio as the sun comes up and warms all the Gooey Goo - Knowing that through this blog I am getting to connect with so much love. Friends new and old, fellow Moms, family and broken or not we can all build bigger hearts. Buckets of Gooey Gooing Good Stuff!

What is your Gooey Goo Good Stuff this week?  Expand yourself - find the Goo! 

Mountain Bikes and Climbing

 In my last post I made a reference to biking and a couple people suggested I get my bike out. Well, it has taken me over two weeks and a running injury to get my mountain bike out. Both of those are out of character for me. 1 – It has never been this late in the season and I haven’t been on my bike. 2 – In all my years of trail running I have never fallen and gotten hurt (this was a crushing blow to my runner’s ego J).

Mountain biking has always been a mirror for my life. As soon as I my tire takes hold of the dirt the ride will play out in a perfect symphonic reflection of my life in that point in time. Yesterday was no different. Lifting my bike off the hooks in the garage I could feel the weight bear down on my shoulders and the clumsiness of an upside down bike sway awkwardly above my head. Grief, I thought to myself. The heavy awkwardness of grief became visible as a mountain bike. But I love my mountain bike; it has taken me some amazing places and taught me some great lessons. Is it too much to hope that grief will also take me places that someday I will see the value in?

My choice of trails couldn’t be more aligned with the current status of my life. A nasty climb, a climb that is relentlessly steep, 2.3 miles of dry dusty dirt gaining over 1500 ft of elevation. I roll onto the trail and dodge around the wide green gate that separates this trail from others, “Private Property” the signs says.  Yes, grief is private property so, feeling like I meet the criteria, I see no reason for me not to continue on the trail. At the top of the trail you are greeted with a green picnic table under a wooden shelter. Given the fact that I haven’t been on my bike at all this year I tell myself I don’t have to make it to the picnic table at the top, I can turn around anytime. But I know I won’t. Not because I am a  talented climber, but because I love the downhill. So, I will grind my way to the top just so I can experience the fearless descent that raises my heart rate and I push the limit knowing falling down the mountain is much worse than falling up while climbing… but I like it! . It usually takes me 3x’s longer to get to the top then from the top down.

The trail forks and to the left the trail becomes narrow (singletrack as we say in Colorado) and rolls along the ankles of the foothills for a couple miles before appearing again on the side of the main road. To the right (which is what I take) the trail stays wide enough for a jeep, it’s dry, and rocky with little tuffs of plants spotting the middle line like lines on a road, only much more irregular. And it rises abruptly announcing its existence. When I woke up on October 9^th my road forked. One fork was the life I expected, gently rolling along the ankles of life undulating ups and downs that everyone has eventually ending on the main road with everyone else travelling their lives. Without having been given a choice I faced the trail to the right that day. And now I am physically living out the last nine months mounted on 26 pounds of grief.

I dropped my head, relaxed my shoulders and without much thought readjusted my gears so that I could spin up this first section. As I turned the pedals around and around and my breathing began to become audibly louder I glanced up the trail and saw another biker spinning his way up as well. I was reminded of the parents who had also lost children that reached out to me after Brandon died. They were further up the climb, still grinding away, but took time from their own slog to show me that it can be done. I was so grateful for those Mom’s and Dad’s in those first days. I desperately needed to know that people keep moving ahead even if it’s steep, rutted out, hot and unbearable at times. I needed to know that parents didn’t just give up and recklessly abandon the climb.

I did meet one parent, a Mom, who had abandoned the climb. I knew she had lost her daughter 4 years earlier and I reached out to her to meet for lunch. Our lunch was an awkward exchange of anger and resentment with her leading the charge. She would hunt for the smallest shard of anger in my words and pounce on them eager to fertilize them and grow them into something that would smother my desire to continue to climb. It was as if she wanted to pull me off my bike and drag me back to the green gate, forcing me to let go of my hard work that had gotten me that far. In ownership of my own climb, I was very angry in those early days (and still am sometimes). It wasn’t hard for her to find places to dig in, I gave her plenty to work with and she eagerly took them. She filled my head with how horrible the Holidays would be, how she hadn’t moved on, how her other child was in therapy (maybe it should be her in therapy), how her marriage had suffered, how she avoided social situations. But, in all this she did give me a wonderful gift. She showed me what I could and would become if I didn’t continue to climb, even if I had to get off my ‘grief bike’ and push it over rocks while leaning heavily on the handle bars gasping for air (yes, I have actually assumed this position while climbing and there is usually lots of cussing as well). As much as I hate this climb, as much as I wish Brandon was here now, as often and as much as I want to quit climbing, as exhausted as I am from forcing the pedals around one more (expletive) time… The alternative is not an option for me. I don’t want to be that person and some days it takes everything I am to not become that person. Brandon was fiercely determined and if I believe the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree he must have gotten it from somewhere! So I will grind away!

Crying Myself Awake

 "You are one of the most spectacular women I have ever encountered in my life.I love you with all my heart and I've come to realize that. I want to thank you for everything you have done for me. You have made so many sacrifices for me. I am so grateful and blessed to have a mother like you. One of the most important things I've learned here is patience. It applies to everything. To life, to relationships, to love and even finding your 'personal legend'.  

Excerpt from a letter from Brandon when he was at Open Sky, July 2008

It happens only occasionally, but since Brandon died there are nights that I am awaken by the wetness of my own tears leaving salt tracks across my face. The tears are big and heavy. Perhaps it's an overflow valve of sorts. As the rest of me lies silently sleeping these big heavy tears escape from the valves and race away from the sadness that squeezed them out of my subconscious and released them into reality. I don't think they like reality anymore than I do. They race toward the pillow hoping to be reabsorbed into the softness of the cotton. I appreciate the pain the tears feel and wish my own comfort could be found in simply lying my head on the pillow and being held by it's soft cotton and goose down.

It happened this morning sometime between four and five in the morning. How do I know this? Because it wasn't until four that Jason came home. This is part of Jason's journey through grief. There is no right or wrong, which is part of the challenge, each of us must author our personal Owner's Manual. Jason's way is to stay away for as long as he can, both physically and emotionally. He has been a passenger watching his brothers struggle, fall, climb get back up, stand tall and mature into strong young men. This time however, he must learn to use his own compass to map.

The tears that escape at night and wake me up while leaving tell-tale tracks of salt across my face are escorted by my dreams of Brandon.  I try so hard to stay asleep and hang on to hearing his voice, feeling him hug me and seeing his beautiful smiling face. Once I have lost my grip on sleep and the tears pull me back from the love I feel in these dreamy moments, I lay in bed and force myself to remember each and every detail. What Brandon was wearing, where we were, what he said, how tall and strong he always is in my dreams. He is always happy and, except for one dream, we always hold each other. Each time I repeat to him how much I love him and miss him, over and over again until I feel I must really being saying out loud into the silence of my room. I truly believe he is with me in these dreams, the love I feel when I press myself into his chest isn't something I've ever felt before. The love is bright and radiant and has a sharpness to it. In these dreams my heart physically hurts in the same way it did the day I found out he died. Growing pains I tell myself... If my heart wasn't broken I couldn't feel the undetectable stitching, stapling, strapping, gluing and duct taping of the small pieces coming back together.  I also want to believe it's Brandon's way of reallocating strength and love to me so that I can make it through another day.  So that I can continue to rebuild my broken heart into one with huge expansion joints that enable me to love deeper for those in my life that deserve it most.

p.s.Yes, Jason got a stern talking to this morning and I woke him up at 10:00 to babysit Sam while I ran. Sam, who is working at potty-training, took it upon himself to flush his diaper (and shirt) down the toilet and pee on the couch while Jason was cleaning the bathroom. I think that is punishment enough!